


vessels

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M, Slice of Life, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 14:14:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16176743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: Jaemin and Renjun run in circles.





	vessels

There’s something to be said about the subtle magic of an eggplant sky, a shadowy flock of birds eating through the flesh, and the drum line practicing in the background. There’s: wind lifting the strands of his hair beneath his hoodie, cold metal of the bleacher railing creating tattoos where his sleeves are bunched up.

Beyond all that: a pair of legs scissoring across the track, slightly off-rhythm to those drum beats. They slow to a stop, and the boy circles back to the starting blocks.

“Hey,” Jaemin calls over the wind. “New kid.”

New kid looks up.

“The locker room’s closing.” He holds up the messenger bag and tennis shoes found on one of the benches in the farthest row away from the door. “You’re welcome.”

New kid looks at his things. Looks back at Jaemin’s face. Looks back at the track.

And then, runs.

 

  

 

Jaemin lives his life bisected into two seasons – cross-country, and track. Off autopilot, summer and winter fill in the rest of the year, but the seasons never really change where he lives, making it easy to forget time’s passing, and then the last school bell rings.

Like all seasons, there are good and bad days, and it’s amidst the vague in-between that a new kid moves into the house a block down from Jaemin’s.

New kid’s name is Renjun.

Jaemin knows this. Jaemin also knows that they share the same advanced biology class, and that Renjun sits across from this kid named Chenle, one year below them that Jaemin’s gone to the same school as since second grade, and that Renjun keeps running on the newly-paved rubber track long after practice is over. He always seems to look up for long enough to see Jaemin sitting in the bleachers with his bike and Renjun’s things, and then looks away and continues running.

On Tuesday, he tries again. “Hey, new kid,” Jaemin shouts. “Wanna walk home together?”

Renjun uses his shirt to wipe the sweat off his forehead. When he looks back at Jaemin, his hair’s sticking up in funny places.

“Sure.” There’s a sort of rhythm to it, but drum line practice is over.

 

  

 

Two years ago, the school had a dirt track.

Two years ago, when Jaemin complained that regular gym class was boring, his mom came home the next day with his older cousin’s once-used pair of spikes. Freshman year was full of unexpected rain and expected nights of cleaning off the bottoms of those shoes until he ran so much that he’d ripped a hole at the heel and drenched his socks in mud on the day the shoe gave out.

Two years ago, Jaemin made the team as the fastest freshman in the 100-meter. Sophomore year, he’d been the fastest sprinter in the district.

Three weeks ago, at try-outs, there was a body two lanes away that hurtled past the line point three seconds before he did. “Fraternizing with the enemy, aren’t we?” Donghyuck deadpans when he finds Renjun sitting with Jaemin at their usual spot on the bleachers during lunch.

Renjun uses his molars to snap a carrot stick. “You run long distance,” he points out.

Jaemin just shrugs when Donghyuck looks at him. “Alright.” He puts his lunch bag between them and swings a leg over the bench. “He can stay.”

Three weeks ago, Jaemin rode his bike home just as the sunset turned fuchsia and locked the door behind him when it’d dissipate into a black, silent night. Now, Jaemin pedals in squiggly lines as Renjun walks beside him, the street lights tinting their faces a lemon kind of yellow.

“Why do you bring your bike,” Renjun asks at the end of the first week, “If you’re not going to ride it home?”

Jaemin loosens his grip on the handlebars. He stops from where he’s walking his bike and wipes his palms on his shorts. “Just because.”

“You know you don’t have to walk home with me.”

“But I want to,” Jaemin says. Jaemin says a lot of things.

“Oh.” On the contrary, Renjun doesn’t. Whether this is because he’s still the new kid or he doesn’t have anything to say to him, Jaemin doesn’t know. “Sure then.”

Sure, then.

 

 

 

Jaemin likes a lot of things about running.

For one, once you hit a certain speed, the entire world seems to melt away until it’s just you, your shoes hitting the ground, the heaving in your lungs, and the burning in your legs.

“Lactic acid,” Renjun tells him between gulping down water. “That’s called lactic acid.”

Renjun, among being the new fastest sprinter on the team, is also good at school. Aside from straight A’s on all their biology assignments, Renjun’s schedule was full of advanced level classes from when they’d compared and neat, even handwriting when the rest of his binder was a mess.

“Well,” Jaemin says, slightly miffed. He could be jealous of Renjun. Or annoyed that he’d been completely ignored by him for the first few weeks they’d known of each other’s existence. “What do _you_ like about running?”

“I dunno.” Renjun breaks his granola bar in half. He sticks one part in his mouth and holds out the other to Jaemin. “I just do.”

Jaemin doesn’t like granola bars, but he takes it anyway. “You spend an extra hour running around the track every day,” he states. “And you just do. Hmm.”

“Hmm,” Renjun imitates with a grin. It exposes this small gap between two of his teeth at the side of his smile that he’d never noticed before. Jaemin keeps thinking about it.

 

 

  

On the days it rains, they don’t run.

To be fair, if the rain isn’t pouring down hard enough, they’ll put on hoodies and suck it up. But when it’s raining so badly that Jaemin and Donghyuck come into the locker room tracking mud and rainwater all over the floor, coach puts them on weight training for thirty minutes before letting them all go home.

“Hey,” Jaemin knocks Renjun’s elbow with his own as the other is pulling on a shirt. “Do you wanna catch a movie with me and Donghyuck?” When Renjun shoots Donghyuck a wary glance, Jaemin supplies, “His sister’s driving us.”

Renjun uses the shirt he just changed out of to wipe the sweat off his forehead. After he’s balled it up into his gym bag and looks back at Jaemin, his hair’s sticking up in funny places. “I’m good. You guys go ahead.”

Jaemin opens his mouth but then Donghyuck’s telling him that his sister’s already in the parking lot. Then: there’s Renjun’s echo-y _see you tomorrow_ in an already cleared-out locker room, Donghyuck grumbling that he actually has his driver’s license _thank you very much_. The heavy droplets of rain pelting against the roof of Donghyuck’s sister’s car in a cadence. Drum line doesn’t practice when it rains, either.

And sometimes when it rains, it pours.

 

 

 

Renjun isn’t at practice the next day, or the day after that. Or in their advanced biology class, where they finished a two-class dissection of a frog and the smell of chemicals made Jaemin’s eyes water. When he’d looked up to blink, he made eye contact with Chenle, who'd been assigned to work with another table, Renjun’s seat empty.

Jaemin thinks of himself as a good friend. Donghyuck thinks:

“Are you two even friends?” he says when Jaemin asks him for the last few days of AP Calculus homework. Donghyuck shares the same teacher as Renjun, if Jaemin remembers his schedule correctly. “I mean, would you do this for _me_ if I missed a couple days of school?”

Probably not, and Jaemin’s known Donghyuck since kindergarten. He shrugs. “He’s new.”

The front door to Renjun’s house has an intricate pattern carved into it. Jaemin’s following one of the swirls with his eyes when Renjun opens it. He looks confused.

“Don’t you have track?” he asks, after he’s let Jaemin in and offered him a glass of water from the refrigerator.

“Already done,” Jaemin says, sitting cross-legged on the couch. It drives Donghyuck batshit crazy, having a non-family member’s bare feet on furniture. “You know we only get back so late because you’re training for a marathon, or something.”

Renjun blows his nose loudly. “Well,” he starts slowly, like there’s an elephant in the room. “My mom says it’s the flu.”

Jaemin raises an eyebrow. “And how did you get the flu?”

“Like normal people do.” Renjun sniffs. To Jaemin, it sounds like he’s trying to suck his sinuses into his skull. “It was raining. Decided to run on the track for an hour. Got sick.”

After Jaemin scoots over his homework and a copy of his lab write-up from the dissection, handwritten neater than the one he turned in: “You know for someone smart,” he tells Renjun. “You do some real dumb things.”

Renjun laughs at that until he coughs, and then after that still. 

 

 

 

Renjun likes:

That running is cut into distinct measures of time, and that he can whisper those numbers back to himself as he waits for the rest of the sprinters to cross the line, hands on his knees. People, he says, set records for other people to break them, if that idea doesn’t break them first.

Renjun also likes running because this is his last year on track.

“But we’re juniors.” It’s another typical track season day – almost six-thirty, sky turning the color of Donghyuck’s sister’s lipstick, Renjun catching his breath on the bleachers before they walk home in their spikes – but Jaemin can’t help but feel like he’s lost something with the setting sun.

“That’s why,” Renjun says, like it makes sense. Senior year, college applications, the future. Things are beautiful because they’re ephemeral, or some bullshit like that.

“Then what about us?” Jaemin says. Jaemin says a lot of things. Jaemin also, in this moment, looks through the rapid onset of dimness in an eggplant dusk to meet what he thinks are Renjun’s eyes.

“What about us?” On the contrary, Renjun kind of laughs. Whether this is because he doesn’t have anything to say to that or he doesn’t know what to say to that, Jaemin doesn’t know.

The field lights come on. Jaemin realizes he’d mistaken Renjun’s eyes in the darkness in favor of his lips.

Jaemin likes:

That there’s a subtle magic in the air of an eggplant sky, a shadowy flock of birds eating through the flesh, and the drum line practicing in the background. There’s: him and Renjun, sitting on the bleachers, a bottle of Powerade and Renjun’s stuff between them.

Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they walk home in complete silence, apart from the screeching brake on Jaemin’s bike, sharp like a knife in the quiet. Sometimes, Renjun pedals in languid squiggly lines because Jaemin’s got the longer legs _made for walking home,_ or so Renjun tells him, and the street lights tint their faces a lemon kind of yellow.

Jaemin likes: the entire world melting away until it’s just him, his shoes hitting the ground, the heaving in his lungs, and the burning in his legs.

But in that there’s: a pair of legs scissoring across the track, slightly off-beat to the distant rhythm of the drum line. And the sky is so, so purple.

 

 

  

It’s not a surprise but Renjun places first in the 100-meter at their first meet of the season. Jaemin, on the other hand, trails behind in fourth.

“Hey,” Jaemin says after Renjun’s jogging back to where their team’s set up camp in the middle of the field from taking a picture with second and third place. “Congratulations.”

Renjun grins back at him. “Not too bad, huh?” he kids. He takes the medal from around his neck and drapes it over Jaemin’s neck, and they’re laughing at the funny-shaped sunburn on Donghyuck’s nose the entire time.

Jaemin doesn’t tell him that even though he has too many of these same medals hanging on his wall at home, it’s like the first time he’s tasted victory.

 

 

  

So:

“What about us?” Renjun laughs. For once, Jaemin’s afraid that the wind he’s always shouted above will take these words and this moment between them and blow them so far, far away that no amount of practice can make him run fast enough to catch a hold of it again.

“I –” Jaemin says. Jaemin says a lot of things. “New kid.”

So many things that, if he had to sort everything, it’d be hard to tell which ones he meant. “Renjun Huang.”

(Renjun Huang, who beat him at try-outs and made Jaemin realize that he hated to lose. Renjun Huang, who lets Jaemin walk home with him, who lets Jaemin call him _new kid_ , who practices in the rain, who laughs when he’s got the flu until he coughs and after that still, who runs for hours and hours to make up for the hours that he won’t be able to run during in the future.)

“I think I like you.”

There’s a subtle magic to the stillness that engulfs their silhouettes, cut-outs from an eggplant horizon, the drum line punctuating each second in the background. There’s: the dying rays of sun that don’t trace Renjun’s face, the wind lifting strands of their hair beneath their hoodies, one figure leaning toward the other in stop motion until two silhouettes become one.

And after what seems like a million years, there’s: “Don’t think.” A hand finds his in the darkness, and the entire world melts away until it’s just Renjun’s clammy fingers, tangling with his own. “Just do.”

Cut to the field lights.

 

 

  

(Quiet as they are, Jaemin doesn’t think he’ll ever forget these words, this moment.)

**Author's Note:**

> these songs were on repeat while writing this fic and i think they'd help with the mood!:   
>  1\. dusk - ford.   
>  2\. oceans - flores
> 
> [cc](https://curiouscat.me/715creeks) (｡･･｡)


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